Washington, D.C.

April 13-15, 1996: Washington, D.C.

Having visited Washington several times since we moved to North Carolina, we took this opportunity to visit a few new places, as well as some old favorites. On the first afternoon, for example, we saw ancient Asian art and James Whistler's Peacock Room at the Sackler and Freer galleries, heard a fantastic Chilean band under the cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin, revisited the Jefferson Memorial, and stopped at the National Archives, where we saw not only the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, but a whimsical exhibit on gifts that Americans have sent to their presidents.

On Sunday morning, we bought muffins at the Old Post Office and ate them on the mall. After a brief visit to the Smithsonian Castle, we returned to one of my favorite sites, the Museum of American History, where we saw some quilts on display and strolled through "After the Revolution," an exhibit on the everday lives of several families in the decades after the American Revolution. Later, while Lisa rested at the hotel before a dinner with FASEB members, I visited the National Portrait Gallery and found one of the best exhibits I have seen in Washington. Part of the Smithsonian Institution's sesquicentennial celebration, "1846: Portrait of the Nation" recreates one of the most exciting times in American history with daguerreotypes, paintings by Thomas Cole and others, an 1846 edition of Herman Melville's Typee, the gear Francis Parkman carried on the Oregon Trail, a bust showing the phrenological regions, and many other items. Also on display are numerous portraits of political, social, and cultural leaders, including President James T. Polk, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, Brigham Young, Frederick Douglass, Daniel Webster, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. As I always feel when I visit the National Portait Gallery, I felt virtually transported to a different time. Before I left, I bought 1846: Portrait of the Nation, a book with photographs from the exhibit and more fascinating descriptions than curators could fit on the walls of the exhibit. That evening, while Lisa attended the FASEB dinner, I returned to the Museum of American History and heard a concert of Handel and Bach on period instruments.

December 27-29, 1996: Washington, D.C.

The MLA's choice of D.C. for the convention was a fortunate one for us. The drive was easy, of course, but we also enjoyed the opportunity to visit a couple of favorite Smithsonian spots, as well as one new one. First, we went to my favorite museum in Washington, the National Portrait Gallery, where we saw "Red, Hot & Blue: A Salute to American Musicals." An impressive collection of photographs, movie posters, window cards, manuscripts, musical scores, and footage from the great American musicals, this exhibit was great entertainment for us. Lisa, who has been at center stage a few times herself, especially enjoyed seeing Irving Berlin's piano and hearing some of her favorite tunes from Oklahoma! and West Side Story. I liked learning about the roots of the American musical theater in the 19th century and seeing again one of my favorite moments in all of cinema: Professor Hill's rendition of "Trouble in River City" in Music Man ("...trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for pool!"). Finally, we both loved seeing Stephen Sondheim's handwritten and revised manuscript for "Tonight" in West Side Story.

After an hour and a half or so at that exhibit, we moved over to the National Museum of American Art, where we saw several sculptures by Edmonia Lewis, a sculptor who began her career in the late 19th century. Having read an article about her in Smithsonian magazine, we were eager to see some of her work, particularly Cleopatra, which is striking in its unglorified view of the dying queen, so often glamorized in art. I also especially liked her sculpture of Hagar.

On the following day, we visited the Renwick Gallery for the first time. Lisa wanted to see the temporary exhibit of several quilts from the early 19th century. Several of them were stunning, both in beauty and in craftsmanship. Lisa especially liked the "beehive," or hexagon, quilts, which require an enormous amount of tedious labor. The quilter has to cut out a hexagon of fabric, iron and baste the fabric to heavy paper cut in the shape of a hexagon, join each hexagon with others to make a design, sew on a backing, and finally quilt the whole thing. One of these beehive quilts had more than 15,000 hexagons and took a decade to piece. We also saw a small quilt pieced by a young woman. The accompanying note said that girls, for whom sewing was an important skill in 19th-century America, often started quilting around age 8 by working on a quilt for a child's bed or a baby doll's bed. In the same museum we also saw a temporary exhibit of woodworking, including an amazing sculpture of a bat sucking nectar from a flower. To emphasize the necessary balance in nature, the woodworker had perfectly balanced the two figures so that neither could stand alone.

If we had had more time, we would have gone to the Museum of Natural History to see one of the Martian meteorites and to the Arts and Industries Building to see the exhibit on immigration, but my interviews took precedence. At any rate, we probably will return in May, when I am scheduled to chair a session on Thomas Wolfe at the American Literature Association in Baltimore. By then, we hope, I will have landed a permanent position, and we will have settled down somewhere between California and Maine.

November 15-16, 1999: Washington, D.C.

I can't imagine a better place for a layover than Washington, D.C. Because of a variety of mishaps--including the late arrival of the preceding train in Chicago and the resulting poor synchronization with freight trains traveling the same tracks--I arrived a whopping four hours late. After crashing at the home of college buddy Pete Amstutz in Arlington, Virginia, I got up the next morning and took a miniature tour of D.C., which I already have visited several times since moving to the East Coast. At the National Portrait Gallery, I saw a fascinating exhibit called "Picturing Ernest Hemingway," which captured both Hemingway's dramatic life and his celebrity status in America. I enjoyed seeing photographs of young Ernest and his lover Agnes, especially after having seen In Love and War, the movie based on their romance. I also learned that Hemingway took part in five or six amateur bullfight free-for-alls and saw a photograph of him in the midst of one. Other highlights were portraits of Hemingway by a friend, a spread on his African safari in Life magazine, and a high school essay on which Hemingway earned a D because of his poor handwriting. After lunch with Pete, I also visited the Washington Monument, which is under renovation, and the National Gallery of Art, where I admired wood sculptures by the medieval sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider and a giant relief of Robert Gould Shaw and his Massachusetts 54th Regiment by American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
 
 

March 5-8, 2001 Highlights National Cathedral Lincoln Memorial Korean War Memorial FDR Memorial Jefferson Memorial Jog on National Mall Ford's Theatre National Archives "Piano 300" Freer Gallery Georgetown Capitol Chinatown Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden National Gallery of Art Jog on Capitol Hill Arlington Cemetery Mount Vernon © Canada 2001 Updated 3/30/01

Washington, D.C. March 5-8, 2001: Educational travel is starting to be a hobby of mine.  Last summer, I took a group of North Carolina Teaching Fellows from across the state to Philadelphia.  This year, over spring break, I hooked up with the UNCP Teaching Fellows for a trip to Washington, D.C. We boarded a bus in Pembroke around 6:30 a.m. on Monday morning.  By 1:30, we were at the National Cathedral in Washington.  I remembered some of the Cathedral from our last visit nearly 10 years ago.  What I didn't remember was the spectacular beauty of the stained-glass windows.  My favorite is the one to the extreme rear and on the left as one faces the altar.  Something about the red in it is particularly brilliant.  I had forgotten some of the details of the cathedral, as well.  It was begun in 1907, and the first service took place in 1912.  The building was not completed, however, until 1990.  Today, it is the second-largest church in the United States and the sixth-largest in the world. Our next stop was the southwest corner of the Mall, where we visited some of the monuments.  After a brief return visit to the Lincoln Memorial, I walked over to the relatively new Korean War Memorial and then to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, also new.  The latter is an attractive, creative, and expansive tribute featuring sculptures, waterfalls, and inscriptions of Roosevelt's famous and not-so-famous quotations.  I took a picture of the controversial statue that depicts Roosevelt in a wheelchair, but my favorite sculpture was one of a man listening to a large tabletop radio.  I like it, I suppose, because it subtly captures a phenomenon I find fascinating.  When Roosevelt took office in 1933, Americans were reeling from the Depression, perhaps the most traumatic event to strike the country since the Civil War.  By the time he left in 1945, they had lived through another catastrophe: World War II.  During that period, they had the marvelous opportunity to track the nation's progress through Roosevelt's regular radio addresses, which he called "fireside chats."  Today, we think nothing of seeing our president on television, but hearing the president's voice in their own living rooms must have been exciting and terribly important for those families gathering around their radios back then. National Mall I started Tuesday with a moving experience: a jog on the National Mall.  I got up around 6:30, cleaned up, dressed, and walked about five blocks to the Capitol.  From the Capitol steps, I looked both up to the magnificent dome and down at the sprawling mall below, then took off.  On a spring day, a run down the mall can be exhilarating.  On the left and right are enormous stone buildings housing some of the world's finest paintings and sculptures, famous airplanes, the Hope Diamond, the Star-Spangled Banner, and thousands of other treasures.  You can't see any of it, but with some imagination you can feel it.  What I felt on this morning, however, was mainly cold--lots and lots and lots of cold.  Leaving the hotel, I had heard the desk clerk say, "You can't go out like that.  You'll freeze."  Must have been the shorts.  What she didn't know is that I also was wearing a thermal shirt and additional shirt under my sweat shirt and that I almost never wear anything but shorts when I jog, even on 30-degree days.  What I didn't know is that it was not a 30-degree day.  Thanks to what seemed like gale-force winds, it felt like a sub-zero day.  I saw perhaps two dozen other diehard joggers while I was out, but everyone seemed to be wearing gloves--everyone but me.  Before I was a quarter way through my route, my hands were stinging.  Nevertheless, I tried to take in some of the sights along the route.  After passing the various museums on the first half of the mall, I gazed up at the towering Washington Monument and then, a little further along, took in the stately Lincoln Memorial and the long reflecting pool that stretches before it.  After climbing the memorial's steps, I enjoyed a few intimate moments with Lincoln--something one can do on a freezing morning before 8 a.m.--and thought about what he did for this country.  As anyone who has seen the statue here can testify, the sculptor perfectly captured Lincoln's grand character--his intelligence, his devotion, even some of his sadness, I think.  I then turned around and saw what Lincoln sees, sitting there all day every day: the Washington Monument and a hint of the America that stretches beyond.  Finally, I descended the steps and finished my run, heading back up the mall and winding up at the Capitol, where I climbed the steps once more and took one more look down at the mall.  But for the cold, the run is a relatively easy one: a generally level 5.25 miles. After breakfast, the Fellows and I began our day at Ford's Theatre, where we heard a dynamic presentation on Lincoln's assassination from a fine park ranger.  Although I had visited the theatre a few years ago, I learned a few new things during this presentation.  Our next stop was the National Archives, where I saw a moving exhibit called "Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives."  Among the scores of photographs on display, only a fraction of the more than 17 million photographs managed by the National Archives, were a handful I found particularly remarkable.  One captured a dozen or so immigrant children on Ellis Island in 1908, and another shows a boyish American soldier in Vietnam in 1965.  After joining some of the Fellows for lunch, I spent perhaps my favorite hour or so of the trip at "Piano 300," an exhibit on the history of pianos in the Smithsonian International Gallery.  In addition to seeing some fascinating displays on the complex mechanics of pianos and hearing snatches of piano music by Rachmoninoff and others, I saw a number of extraordinary instruments, including an 1892 Steinway grand, an 1865 grand piano manufactured by Steinway rival Chickering, and an 1876 Weber upright.  Along the way, I learned about the fascinating history of the piano, from its invention by Florentine Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1700 to the piano dueling of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and a rival later in the 1700s to the celebrated recitals of Franz Liszt in the 19th century to the rise of Asian piano manufacturing in our own age.  Finally, I wound up my afternoon on the mall with a stroll through the Freer Gallery and the Museum of African Art.  For a taste of local nightlife, we went next to Georgetown.  The cold weather kept most of the Fellows inside the local mall, but I went for a walk along M Street, shopping a little and taking a brief detour to enjoy some of the delightful rowhouses in the neighborhood.  After browsing at a local bookstore, I ate a delicious dinner of caramel chicken at Miss Saigon, an award-winning Vietnamese restaurant on M Street.  We ended the day with a brief tour of Washington at night--a special treat for me since I mostly have experienced the monuments only in the daytime. Our third day began with a visit to the Capitol, where we met Representative Mike McIntyre from our district in North Carolina and explored the inside of the building, particularly the spectacular Rotunda.  After lunch at the Chop Sticks restaurant in Chinatown, I took a stroll around the National Gallery and Hirshhorn sculpture gardens and then spent an hour and a half in the magnificent National Gallery of Art.  Even if it didn't contain a single painting, I could spend an hour or more in this museum just enjoying its center rotunda, enormous indoor fountain, and bright atriums.  The gallery does have paintings, though--hundreds of them, as well as numerous sculptures.  If I lived closer to Washington, I think, I would come just to take in a room or two at a time--the Italian High Renaissance on one day, for example, and the art of 17th-century Spain on another.  Instead, on this occasion I simply wandered from room to room looking for pieces to catch my eye.  Many did.  I was especially taken by the works of Raphael and Titian.  I had heard the names, but on this visit I felt I understood for the first time their greatness.  After walking past dozens of paintings by their predecessors, I saw in their work--Raphael's Alba Madonna, for example-- something different, something subtle but extraordinary. By our fourth and final day in Washington, the weather was not nearly as cold.  I started the day with a morning job on Capitol Hill, where I saw a number of charming row houses.  The highlight for me was the birthplace of America's "March King," John Phillip Sousa, whose "Stars and Stripes Forever" is one of my favorite patriotic tunes.  After checking out of our hotel and eating breakfast, we visited Arlington Cemetery.  Because I had been there two or three times on previous trips, I didn't feel compelled to visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and other famous parts of the cemetery.  Instead, I took in one lesser-known site, the relatively new Women's Memorial, and hiked back up to one of my favorite spots, Arlington House.  Standing in front of the house, which belonged to Robert E. Lee before it was confiscated by the government during the Civil War, I took in the spectacular view of Washington across the Potomac River. We wound up our tour with a trip to Mount Vernon, George Washington's home on the Potomac River.  I had been there before, but I could go again and again, if for no other reason than to stand on a high bluff gazing down at the winding Potomac and then up at Washington's majestic home.  I enjoyed the trip at least as much as the students, probably more.  The only things missing were Lisa and Essie, though they were in my thoughts.  I hope next time to bring them along.